20170420

Indigo Perry

White Like Fire
(after Nick Cave)
From down deep where the cycles are
viscous. I thought I'd be the
weightless self here at least.
But gravity has my limbs and
moments of liminal falling, softly.
All my raindrops over you scattered in the power-
thieving wind. Shaking me to a wakefulness that I wasn't ready for.
He has this way of speaking slowly in a sad kind of poetry and we listen and descend
into the same lulled momentum
Light like full-moon gleam shuddering and
shifting as trees and clouds dance in the storms
falls
over
us
And maybe you have never looked so
lovely
to me It's hard to resist
touching. The innocence so
present that it hurts like ecstasy.
Claws inside now, trying hard to drag me back into
my own body, cast me inside out, anything to
stop me
breaking
this.
I am here.
The place avoided. The in-between.
Staggered figures of me and me
run back to
nowhere
to what's already gone grappling for its
edges in the dark, like a waking me trying to push my way back into a dream
that has already travelled
onwards to dissipation and disappearance.
And then throwing myself to the other side
to an imagined future moment
in which I am whole and glued together
so perfectly that you can't see the lines on my face.
And in that place I no longer mind what words of love
you speak
or don't speak and I forget to count the increments in between.
It too crumbles.
I'm only hearing the humming
Strangely, I'm not dying.
The hurt is in the usual parts, the old warning alarms of when to leave.
Hands once bound ache
and vibrate. Feet once
broken
throb and are numb and running at the same time. And
the gorge now exposed to the light
and the fury of you
Stings like prematurely born layers of
skin.
This is where I am,
even though they all keep trying to leave.
Not begging to re-enter the lived-and-died
dream and not gashing my hands with
trying to climb into a future of nothing
but the thinnest air to
fall through again.
At least here the ground under my feet is solid. Here
I can try to be
what I've never known.
And stop trying to annihilate
the truth of her pieces. It's all right
and it's not at all
all right.
She is
all of it
Not in need of the protection of sad pasts
Or platitudes of bloodless futures
Just this.
The discomfort of not knowing.
Awkward rebuildings and hurt
and
sadness
that can't even be spoken
without inviting in catastrophe
Again.
It's not all that's here,
cold, hard,
and softly fragrant.
There is joy.
The sweet existence of complexity
and the relief of imperfection.
Surrendering to loving you anyway.
I see a child, an adolescent child,
sleeping inside me glazed golden by the waterfall. You played
lullabies until she lay down to rest
at last.
Perhaps she begins to believe even if she can't possess him still
the rivers run lusciously and the butterflies with inked wings
fly.
The Rain Inside
Uneasy wind sending movement through the window
disturbs the stillness that's keeping me crazy.
Circling
feet swinging over the ground,
never quite touching. Swimming, with
no direction
and no power
amidst the
currents.
Caught,
hooked by a barb
at the mouth, talking around
it talking
talking talking
talking in circles again.
Can't mouth the truth when my
lips are bleeding and my
tongue has gone to the sea
And, the words
hurt. I could
sing like the wind
through spaces in tinkling breakage
and the crash of trees knocked off their feet.
Circle like ghosts through alleys and avenues.
Unintelligible whispers and furies of
howls with nothing to be
pinned or pegged down. But
you
still won't
hear.
The truth, wordless or not, will
circle in the storms and whirlpools
and my words will be threaded
on hooks.
Hunger. Every night,
screeching feet not resting Keep
running and talking Blocking
doors left open Rising seas
topped with delicately balanced
rocks.
No space to breathe.
The pain marks memories on
my sternum, the spirit of
lightning aching to
break over me.
When the rain falls outside, I will let go
and sleep. But inside this rain builds
in dark clouds that stay.
And I am burning.
Opening the Gorge
My blood runs in the ink. Making space, swirling torrents of love.
Once I took home a round pot with handles, sculpted,
figured with the body of an octopus.
And I wake, marked with the tentacles laced in lifelines around my fingers. Diving in it's
easy to lose my way in the dark so thick it has a
clamouring
soundlessness. How is it I forget
that I always
resurface,
the dream of the blues from in deep meeting the dusk where I will swim, washed pale And
remember.
Dance through shining mirrors. Hold
the flames that set me
burning
like Frida until they illuminate me No annihilation this time. Losses to hold in arms
like long-rushed wildflowers
or a baby too heavy to stay with me.
What is the cost
of being. Heart trussed until it can't breathe. The mornings,
they are lethal.
I know I've lost something
And is it true that I've
missed something. Because it seems to me that being strong and keeping alive
means
pretending.
I can do that. Most of the time. It's not so different from being drugged to the point
where I even pretend to cry And mime
the sexual arousal that's off with the lowlights of the twilit sky. I open the entrance to the
gorge of my heart and that's not
pretending. What is it that I don't get.
Yes, it seems that being real means
pretending.
You put tremors through me like the treadling of fine lace. I am determined
not to break another
lifeline, another place of warmth in the cool, moony night of storms that I am.
For one who shatters I am strangely unbreakable but still
I can break things.
I laughed once while he broke rare, collectable crockery by throwing it over his back fence.
He was just
human.
I'm not sure if I am.
When I looked up
I heard oceans and saw you with eyes like universes. I emerge in
wild form, pure essence.
No one has seen me from here.
No one but you. And from
this place, the wild-creature thrum of layered existences and births and dyings and
especially of lovings,
I see
you.
In your perfection. And this is the
beauty that
is the human
experience
and why all is forgivable and forgiven.
But it hurts to see you go. The safety
under the darkness of the night will go. Morning will come.
And
mornings are
lethal.
This strange comfort
offered that the
darkest nights are
always followed by
mornings –
No.
Mornings hurt. I set a piece, harp and piano, to wake me softly,
to hold up a hazed mirror
It tells me I'm not crazy
It's not my imagination that it all
hurts and if I open my eyes
slowly after the blinking-under
of tears I can be safe
to wake.
The slowly
enunciated notes of
deception. My friend tells me that
being born and dying alone, living alone on the inside, breaks his heart.
In dance I meet his gaze and see the redness. Quelled fire.
(Have I got it wrong?)
(Am I missing something?)
(Are you
all
pretending?)
All so hard on one another
and on ourselves I want to hold on to what slips away
like
fishes. Breakages.
Recurring Dream
At sea, alone.
Alone, in my bed at 3am.
Stuck with silence, alone.
Amidst my own personal global catastrophe.
I die of words, over and over. You'd think I'd learn.

Indigo Perry is a writer living in the Yarra Valley, outside Melbourne. Her book Midnight Water: A Memoir, was shortlisted for the National Biography Award. These poems are written during improvisational sessions as part of a collaborative performance art project called Illuminous, with trumpet player Andrew Darling. Indigo's writing is digitally projected onto a wall or screen as she writes. indigoperry.com/illuminous.